Shallow Graves (25 page)

THE BENNINGS HAD
lived in the same house since Ricky was in kindergarten. For a few years they had invited everybody in the class over for Ricky's birthday. I remembered those parties in a vague blur of sticky frosting, melting ice cream, colorful paper streamers, and once, maybe, a clown that made Jill Patterson cry, but that might have been somewhere else.

The house was dark. It didn't look like it had in the nightmare I'd had at Ingrid's. It was smaller, brown rather than gray, and there was no light in the upstairs window.

He was home. I could feel him.

I stashed my skateboard at the edge of the lawn and ducked
into the shadows. I changed into the mud-stained party clothes I had been wearing when I died. The shirt was Melanie's; I had forgotten until I pulled it over my head. She had told me not to spill beer on it and not to have sex in it, and we had both laughed. She hadn't said anything about getting murdered in it, but I felt guilty anyway. It was one of her favorites.

I left my backpack in the grass and walked around the house, looking for a way in. They had locked all their doors and windows on the first floor. I could break a windowpane, but I didn't want to wake anybody up. I found my way in when I spotted the dog flap in the back door. It was closed up with a plastic board on the inside, but the board wasn't locked into place. I slid it out and squeezed myself through the dog door.

I was in the kitchen before I remembered that
dog door
means
dog.
A low growl rumbled in the darkness. A big, angry German shepherd.

But it was only a dog, and I'm not human anymore. I stepped toward it and growled right back. That big German shepherd backed away with an alarmed whine and cowered in the corner by its food bowl.

“Good dog,” I whispered.

I followed the shadows upstairs, slipped into Ricky's room, and shut the door behind me. In the light from the street, I could see him asleep on his twin bed. There were clothes and shoes scattered all over the floor. On the desk was a square graduation cap with the tassel dangling over the edge. The room smelled like teenage boy: sweat, dirty socks, the chemical offense of cheap body spray.
The clinging shadows of his guilt filled the room with a darkness I felt more than saw. It reminded me of a nature program I had watched once, a diver's view of a kelp forest off the California coast, impossibly tall dark stalks swaying and drifting against the distant, wavering sunlight.

I sat on the edge of the bed and put my hand over his mouth.

I said, “Hey, Ricky.”

He woke slowly, eyes blinking, lips moving beneath my fingers. His breath was warm and damp on my palm. First there was disbelief, confusion, the narrow-eyed squint of somebody who thinks he's in a dream.

Then he inhaled, and he was awake. He tried to sit up and scramble away from me.

“Shh.” I pressed my hand harder over his mouth, pushing his head into the pillow. “Don't do that. I just want to talk.”

Ricky's eyes were wide and pale and he began to shake his head, back and forth, back and forth, hair whispering against his pillow.

“Isn't that what you told me? You just wanted to talk. You didn't care if I wanted to listen.”

He made a noise in his throat. It sounded like the scared whimper of the dog downstairs. His hands clenched uselessly at the edge of his sheet.

“I'm wondering how surprised you are to see me,” I said. He flinched and his eyes twitched rapidly. “You must have freaked out when you heard about that dead guy they found where you buried me. You must have pissed yourself, thinking they would find me next.”

He shook his head.

“I'll let you talk, because I want to hear the answer to that,” I said. I put my other hand against his neck. His skin was warm, sweaty; I made a disgusted face but pressed my fingers into his throat. “If you try to scream, you'll be dead before you take a breath. Just tell me. Are you surprised to see me?”

I removed my hand from his mouth.

“You're dead,” he whispered.

“Wow, you're a genius. You want to see something?” I tilted my chin up, let him get a good look at the bruises around my neck. “See that? I still have the bruises. The bruises
you
gave me.”

I caught myself as my voice rose, pressed my lips together and breathed.

“I didn't,” he said. “I didn't, I didn't, I didn't mean—”

“Shut up.”

He obeyed.

“I don't care. Shut up.”

He was making fists in his blanket and he was trembling all over, like a rabbit hiding in an open field. I had never seen anything more pathetic. I pushed my thumb into the side of his neck. I could feel his pulse racing.

“Did you know this could happen? Somebody told me things like me mostly come out of war zones and epidemics. Are you an epidemic, Ricky?”

“No,” he said, a weak little moan.

“Did you do it on purpose? Did you want me to be
special?
”

“No, no, no,” he stuttered, his breath catching in half-formed sobs.

Maybe he was lying, maybe he wasn't, but I didn't care anymore. I didn't care what Ricky knew. I didn't care why he had killed me. He had put me in a grave, but I had climbed out, and he didn't matter. I was so fucking tired of men deciding whether or not I got to go on existing for another day.

“I have this problem,” I said. “I really want to kill you.”

“No!”

I slapped my hand over his mouth again. “Shut up. You don't get to have an opinion. I really want to kill you. I don't think I want revenge, exactly, although I do want some payback for all that shitty poetry you sent to me. I bet you thought I didn't read it. I did, you know. I read it to my friends and we laughed about it, but I had to ask somebody to point you out at school because I had no idea who you were.”

He was crying now. I dug my fingernails into his skin; they were still flecked with the blue polish I had put on that afternoon at Melanie's house, and just long enough to draw blood. Ricky was saying “
please, please
” behind my hand, the word little more than an animal whine. He squirmed and kicked his legs, drew up his knees, and grasped at the blanket over his crotch; he had wet himself. But he didn't push me away. He was too scared to try. My fingernails left four half-moon specks of blood on his neck. In the morning he would see them and know it hadn't been a dream.

“I want to kill you.” I looked down at him pressed into his pillow. I felt his hot breath on my hand. His shadows surrounded us like a forest. “But I'm not going to. Not tonight.”

Ingrid thought I didn't know how this would end, but I did.
Nothing on my list could have worked. There was only one way out for me, and I wasn't going to take it.

He blinked rapidly and tears streaked down his face, and suddenly I felt bored and annoyed and angry that I was wasting my time with this gross little creep in his childish bedroom while he cried and pissed his pants. I took my hand from his mouth. He wasn't going to make a sound. He was an irrelevant little rodent.

I stood to leave. At the door, I looked back.

“I'm going to be watching you,” I said. “You won't see me, but I'll be there. I might change my mind someday.”

IF KAREN GARROW
is right, and all the other physicists who imagine such things, there's a universe out there where I call my dad and get a ride home. There's a universe where Melanie kisses me back. There's a universe where I scream for help and somebody hears me.

There's a universe where that night happens just like in this one—party, kiss, Ricky, death—except they find my body and they catch him. The police interrogate him in a small dingy room with his parents and a lawyer at his side, and he cries as he says, “I didn't mean to hurt her, I didn't mean it, I swear, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it.” News articles talk about what a surprise it is, that such a nice
young man could do such a thing. Surely it was an accident. They mourn his lost potential, his lost track scholarships, how tragic it is that one night ruined his entire life. They write articles and have meetings warning teenage girls about the dangers of drinking and partying. Nobody writes articles telling teenage boys not to stalk and kill girls who don't like their stupid adolescent poetry. Maybe they mourn me, as an afterthought, but I'm already gone. It's too late for me to matter.

There's a universe out there, or several, where I survive the night. I fight him off. I get away. There's a universe where I'm too ashamed to tell anybody, and there's a universe where I call the cops, give a statement to a sympathetic officer in the glow of the cruiser lights. I go home to be hugged by my mother and tucked in by my father, and maybe a few months later I write about it in my college essay. I tell the faceless admissions officers what it felt like to be that scared, to face danger that real, and I make up some bullshit about how it only made me more determined to do what too many people said women couldn't do, and it works, and they love my essay and they admire my determination and my grades and my test scores, and I go to MIT, or maybe Caltech with its palm trees and smog-shrouded desert mountains, and I'm good at college. I have fun and I work hard and my classes are challenging and rewarding, and after a year or two I move into an off-campus apartment with a nice girl or a nice boy, and we take turns cooking dinner and argue about the dishes. Maybe my nice girl or nice boy comes with me to graduate school, to my first postdoc, or maybe by then I've found somebody else to hold my hand and share my bed and take me to
mind-numbing action movies when I'm stressed and drag me on a camping trip for distraction when I'm waiting to hear from NASA.

Or maybe there's nobody at all, maybe Melanie was right all along about how I'm good at casual hooking up but bad at dating, and there's nobody beside me when I get the phone call and I can barely hear the words over the roaring in my head, and I pack up to move to Houston alone, but Mom and Dad are there to help me carry boxes of books out to the moving truck, and I'm still single years later when the mission to Mars gets the green light, and the news media and bloggers talk about that more than they talk about my role on the crew and my scientific accomplishments. They speculate that I was chosen because I'm unmarried and childless, and is it even fair to make a decision based on a lifestyle choice they all suspect is unnatural anyway, and they argue about whether it's ethical to send a woman into space for so long with the radiation and risk of infertility, but I don't care, I don't care, I'm too busy to care in the months before the launch, too busy to do more than endure their stupid questions and give carefully vetted replies, firm, quotable, sharp but not offensive, never offensive, and I always smile, and then there are preliminary tests, and there is lift-off, and in the final moments of the countdown I vow not to look back, not even a glance, not until the earth is no more than a distant blue speck I don't know that I'll ever see again.

There's a universe somewhere where I sit on the edge of Ricky's bed, surrounded by the grasping shadows only I can feel, and I touch his fever-hot skin, and he dies, and I die with him. In the
morning his parents find us, him in his pajamas and me in my party clothes, two empty bodies and answers nobody wants.

There's a universe, or several, where I die. My body rots away to bones and nobody ever digs me up and that's it. That's the end.

I LEFT RICKY'S HOUSE
and wound through the empty streets to Centennial Park. I didn't go anywhere near my neighborhood and the house that had always been home. I didn't want the temptation.

The lake was inky black and there were clouds gathering over the water, blotting out the stars. It took me several minutes to work up the courage to step onto the sand, and when I did I held my breath, expecting it to shift and rasp beneath my feet, roiling into imprisoned faces and hands at the edge of my vision.

It didn't. It was only sand.

I changed out of my party clothes right there on the beach and jammed them into the bottom of my backpack. I didn't want to
touch them again, but I didn't want to throw them away either.

I sat at the edge of the water and listened to the waves dragging on the shore. It was just me and the lake for a while, until the most dedicated early morning joggers and dog walkers emerged and the sky began to lighten. The first runner who came close startled me so much I jumped to my feet and whirled around. In the darkness I was certain she was hunched and lurching on crooked legs and split hooves, but it was only a woman with a ponytail and bright silver reflectors on her shirt. She didn't see me gaping at her.

I sat down again and breathed until my heart was steady. There was a thin line of clear sky between the water and the clouds. I watched it shift from gray to pink.

I dug my new phone out of my backpack and typed a message:

almost had to add “torn apart by angry dog” to the list.

Several minutes passed. It was barely five a.m. in Chicago, which meant it didn't even qualify as morning in Colorado. I leaned back to rest my elbows on the ground and looked up, but the clouds had overtaken most of the sky.

My phone rang with an obnoxious tone, so loud it made me jump.

“What kind of dog?” Zeke asked.

“German shepherd.”

“I hate those.”

“I made this one cry.”

“It probably deserved it.” He sounded tired but alert. I didn't
think I had woken him up.

“Are you naturally nocturnal?” I asked.

“No. Are you naturally annoying?”

“Yes. Been this way since birth. Hopeless case. Sorry.” I dug my heels into the sand. Somewhere over the lake the wind was rising, the waves coming in faster and choppier. “Were you really asleep?”

“Not really. Where are you? Jake's been worried about you.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, he's like that. I don't care what happens to you,” Zeke said, and I laughed. I considered, for a moment, embarrassing the hell out of Zeke by telling him that that I liked his prickly discomfort more than Jake's unearned concern, but I didn't want him to hang up. I hadn't wanted them to worry about me. I hadn't even known until I sent the text that I was going to contact them again.

“I'm sitting beside Lake Michigan,” I said. “We used to come here on the weekends. Family picnics and stuff. We had five-person Frisbee tournaments. Do ghouls do stuff like that or is it just a human thing?”

“I do know what a picnic is,” Zeke said.

“My mom has a special basket and everything.” I watched the water for a few moments. “I just wanted to see it one more time. It's different in the dark, with nobody here.”

“Watch out for the mermaids.”

“There aren't even any mermaids. Just me, and I'm just sitting here thinking. . . .” I cleared my throat. “I was going to be an astronaut, you know? I had it all worked out. It's the only thing I ever
wanted to do. I was going to be on the first manned mission to Mars.”

I sat up and wrapped my arms around my knees. Zeke didn't say anything.

“And I could have done it. I could have. So why couldn't this have happened to somebody else? Somebody who was never going to do anything. Some loser who was going to spend her life getting high in her parents' basement and telling everybody she was starting a band. Why couldn't that girl die? I'm supposed to be going to graduation parties and packing for college and writing stupid shit in people's yearbooks. Why couldn't he have picked somebody else? Why did he have to pick anybody at all? Why didn't—didn't anybody hear me scream? I did. I tried—I tried to fight him. Somebody must have heard. Did they even care?”

My voice caught and I stopped, pressed the heel of my hand to one stinging eye, then the other. I took a ragged breath. There was something hard and cold opening in my chest, a flower made of razors, pressing outward from the inside.

“I just keep thinking, well, now I'm perfect for the job,” I said, quieter, all of my anger run out of me. “Who needs a space suit when you don't need to breathe and your cells can heal any radiation damage? I probably wouldn't even lose bone density. Not with magic on my side. Now I'm perfect.”

Zeke still didn't say anything, but he didn't hang up on me either. Tears ran down my face in hot lines. The patchwork girl I had stitched together was gone. She had never existed at all. She
had been less real than the wisp of a shadow. There was only me.

We sat there in silence for a long time. I heard the scuff of shoes and rattle of a leash behind me; a woman was running with her golden retriever. She didn't pay any attention to me.

“I didn't kill him,” I said eventually. My voice was rough. It was hard to speak. “The guy who did this to me. I wanted to. But I didn't.”

“Okay.” Zeke's voice was quiet.

Okay. It was okay.

I wiped my nose on the edge of my T-shirt and cleared my throat. “What do people like me even do if they're not running around on quests of magical vengeance? How do I . . . I don't know what I'm supposed to do next.”

“I don't know,” he said. “You live, I guess. Same as everybody else.”

“I can't
live.
I'm dead.”

“You're only kind of dead.”

I laughed at that, a short damp sound. “That's not helpful.”

“You want helpful, call me when it's not the middle of the night.”

“I'll do that,” I said. “This is your warning. You're going to regret ever being nice to me.”

“I already do,” Zeke said, but he probably didn't mean it.

So I said, “Thanks,” and I said, “See you around,” and I let him go back to sleep.

After I hung up, I took Mr. Willow's keys out of the backpack.

Three keys, three locks, three gates.

I twirled the ring around my finger, caught the keys against my palm. I could throw them into the lake. Let them sink to the bottom with all the other trash. Nobody would ever find them. I could be rid of them.

But I didn't. I tucked them away in my pack again, down at the bottom with the party clothes.

Everybody kept telling me they had no idea why I had returned when everybody else stayed dead. Maybe there was nothing to know. Maybe there was no explanation for it. Or maybe there was. Either way, if I wanted to find a reason, a purpose for walking around outside my grave when I should have stayed buried, I was going to have to find it myself.

I headed back to the road. The city was slow to wake. I couldn't remember what day of the week it was. Saturday, maybe. It didn't matter. I went back to Ricky's house and stood on the sidewalk across the street until I saw the curtain in his window twitch, his pale face peek out and disappear again.

I wasn't going to haunt him. I was going to leave and never see him again. There was a whole world out there to explore, magic and monsters and a million inexplicable things, and he was no more than a smudge of filth. But I wanted to give him that one glimpse. I wanted him to think I was always there, always watching, wherever he went, whatever he did. I wanted him to be scared for the rest of his life.

There's something Karen Garrow once said about the fate of the universe. It was on one of her television shows, an episode I watched a dozen times on the basement TV. All of us, she said, all of us and
all of everything that had ever existed and ever would exist, it was all made up of matter that formed in the very first moments of the universe, and it would all last until the very end. The atoms would decay, the particles would break apart, everything would disintegrate and shatter until it was unrecognizable—
too degraded—
but that would take so many billions and billions of years we didn't even have words for time scales that large. Everything had come from the same hot explosion and everything would end in the same empty darkness. It had nothing to do with what we believed or what we wanted or how desperately we needed to reassure ourselves that the brief, bright moment in which we lived meant anything at all. None of it would matter in the end.

And Karen smiled her playful smile, and she said, “But it isn't the end yet. It matters now, everything we have, for as long as we can hold on to it.”

The sun was coming up.

I turned away from the house and the boy hiding behind the window.

Once I thought I heard, beneath the rumble of skateboard wheels on pavement, the slither of sand and low rolling laughter.

I kicked again, and I skated faster, and I didn't hear it anymore.